Wipro initiates move to do away with excess layers of managers and executives

Since Neemuchwala joined Wipro as COO, last year, and more recently took over at the helm of the company, this is an exercise that he has driven across Wipro.Anirban Sen | ET Bureau | Updated: April 26, 2016, 10:07 IST

BENGALURU: India's third-largest software exporter Wipro has initiated moves to trim excess layers of managers and executives inside the company and make the organisation leaner and more decentralised as part of CEO Abidali Neemuchwala's broader strategy, an exercise similar to the one undertaken by arch-rival Infosys, earlier this year.

Neemuchwala has even put together a special team that focuses on this exercise of collapsing complex organisational structures and making the company leaner, and in the process, helping in faster decisionmaking across the board.

Since Neemuchwala joined Wipro as COO, last year, and more recently took over at the helm of the company, this is an exercise that he has driven across Wipro, marking an attempt at breaking away from Indian IT industry's traditional pyramid model that is currently getting disrupted by the impact of automation. "The lower-end of the pyramid will get automated. We may end up seeing something like a diamond-shape, more than a pyramid shape within the organisation structure.

Again, there are certain structures which drive some of that non-linearity and automation are also important," Neemuchwala said in an interview on Wednesday.

"Our robotics team and our MIT engine which focuses on all of the non-linearity are the structural changes that we have put in place. All of that is in place and there is a team up and running doing that," he said.

The de-layering exercise comes at a time when Wipro is struggling to grow at even high single-digit rates, presenting Neemuchwala the unenviable task of orchestrating a top-tobottom turnaround and revive topline growth at the company that has consistently lagged larger peers over the past decade.

On Wednesday, Wipro posted underwhelming fourth-quarter numbers and its outlook for the first three months of 2016-17 was far from rosy, prompting investors to punish the stock by nearly 7% on Thursday morning trade on the NSE.

As part of this de-layering exercise, Wipro is removing additional layers such as that of a "project leader", which are increasingly being rendered redundant as automation kicks in big-time and newer, more specialised roles emerge in India's $160-billion IT industry.

"For example, earlier there used to be a delivery manager under whom there would be a project manager. Then there would be a technical lead, then there would be developers. Then there would be a separate domain expert and a subject matter expert. Now, in digital and agile-development methodology, all of them are sitting around the table.

You don't need a separate tester, you don't need a separate project manager — a scrum master who is also a technical designer and understands architecture is the project leader.

So you remove the whole layer of a project leader," Neemuchwala explained. "There is not necessarily a delivery manager because the developers themselves are in an agile fashion putting code in the production in DevOps. You don't have a delivery manager to manage that," he added.

As the outsourcing boom reached its peak in India during the course of the 2000s and companies grew in high double digits, the likes of TCS, Infosys and Cognizant built up massive workforces to keep up with the pace of demand for software maintenance and development projects.

So massive were these workforces that there were more than a dozen layers from the top to bottom of the organisation, with several layers of mid-management.